The image isn’t totally farcical. Commerce Minister Lianne Dalziel plans to amend the Securities Act so local bodies can float bonds for long-term borrowing. The Nats could well adopt the idea, too.

Council bonds secured against a local body’s rates take would be virtually gilt-edged. And from this week’s bank-guarantee announcement, they’d be backed up by central government.

The idea has merit. Borrowing upfront for long-term infrastructure creates what policy wonks call “inter-generational equity” – the price of an asset with, say, a 50-year life is spread over generations of ratepayers, with successive generations paying annual interest on borrowings plus a share of principal for the period each uses the asset.

Interest on council bonds would probably be somewhere between government stock and bank rates – which is where councils usually borrow now.

It’s win-win: investors get low risk but slightly better returns and councils pay less interest.

Except, except…

Somehow I can’t quite see those gung-ho, go-go guys at Queens­town Lakes District Council being conservative about council bonds.

QLDC scarcely seems conservative on anything. We asked them for a swimming pool and got a $20 million Splash Palace. Frankton needed new toilets and a bus shelter and got gold-plated loos at nearly $1m. And what started as an underground carpark and arts centre on Stanley Street blew out to a $140m Town Hall before being scuppered. And now QLDC’s planning a giant new HQ the size of a footy field…

I can only speculate on why everything gets grand and grandioser at Gorge Road. Perhaps QLDC mandarins have a Local Body Inferiority Complex. Does QLDC desperately want to get noticed – like my Town Hall’s bigger than your Town Hall?

Our council always seems mad-keen to break new ground, like becoming the first local body in New Zealand to privatise regulatory functions by contracting them out to CivicCorp. And when that model failed, QLDC replaced it with another local body first – the “council controlled organisation”.

Or perhaps QLDC bosses have simply forgotten their role in public life – maybe council guv’nors have met so many developers and fat cats during the boom that they dream of becoming Business Inc whizz-kids.

Just imagining now, how might QLDC’s go-go guys get into this revenue-gathering bonds game?

A good little conservative council might issue bonds for a modest town hall and I’d have no problem with that – might even buy a few bonds myself. But let’s be more ambitious, you Gorge Rd guys – let’s be adventurous.

QLDC owns the airport so Airport Bonds are a goer – with interest paid out of airport profits. Or hey, better still –  a departure tax. Whacko!

And what about Water Bonds? The interest could come from levies on water used by householders. Wizard!

Here’s the daddy of them all: a toll road. We’ll float Frankton Road Bonds and toll cars, trucks, coaches, motorcycles – even mountain bikes. W-i-l-d!

Far-fetched? I kid you not, tolling Frankton Rd is being talked about in QLDC as a long-term option.

Bond issues would be easy money for QLDC but they carry “moral risk”, that phrase we’ve heard during the US bank bailout.

The worry is that bankers backed by government guarantees will take undue risk for easy dosh because state-sponsored lifeboats will rescue them if their schemes hit the rocks.

Seems to me we ratepayers are QLDC’s lifeboats.

A year or so back, I recall councillors rolling out the welcome mat for a big briefing by a bunch of financial high-fliers about – local body bonds and derivatives.

I guess even sub-prime sounded good at that time...